


And the Night Will Come

by airdeari



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alcohol, F/F, Post-game Azure Moon, Trans Mercedes von Martritz, Transmasculine Ingrid Brandl Galatea, What Do You Mean That Was Dysphoria, and as many more transes as you like, is it underage drinking if she's an immortal nabatean, it's another makeup support for ingrid but this time it's actually good
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-16
Updated: 2020-07-16
Packaged: 2021-03-04 17:34:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25310203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/airdeari/pseuds/airdeari
Summary: “But whydon’tyou want to put on makeup, even if it’s only every once in a while?” Annette asked, as she held a glass jar of deep red powder near a candle to examine it. “You always say it’s because you don’t have time for things like that, but, well…”Her gesture around the dark, quiet little dressing room was as limp as it was vague. The battle they had fought today was supposed to change the world,hadchanged the world, and yet nothing about it was different enough for Annette to point to.“The war’s over,” she said in a small voice, as if afraid that saying the words aloud would shatter this fragile, unfathomable, so-called peace. “Now we’ve got all the time in the world.”[Day 1 of FE Trans Week: Acceptance/Realisation & Fashion]
Relationships: Annette Fantine Dominic/Mercedes von Martritz, Dorothea Arnault/Ingrid Brandl Galatea
Comments: 8
Kudos: 72
Collections: Fire Emblem Trans Week 2020!





	And the Night Will Come

**Author's Note:**

> This is technically supposed to be a companion piece to my ongoing fic [In Our Bedroom After The War](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22617229), a story about the Blue Lions’ first night after the final battle in Enbarr, that delves more into some characterization with Ingrid that I don’t think I’ll have time to explore in the main story.
> 
> But reading that unfinished behemoth isn’t necessary to appreciate this piece. All you need to know is that Dorothea was spared by Byleth during the final battle.

“I’m not so good with ice magic,” Annette had warned before touching a tentative finger out of her casting form against the glass of Dorothea’s sequestered wine bottle.

They had managed to chip through the subsequent inch-thick coating of ice near the mouth of the bottle enough to extract the cork. By that time, the bubbling wine had chilled enough, or more than enough, to wrap the frozen bottle in cloth and pour out four refreshing glasses. There were only to be four glasses out at any time, and Flayn was never to hold hers in her hand except briefly when sipping, otherwise it was to be placed conceivably within Dorothea’s reach for plausible deniability, just in case Seteth returned from the palace sooner than expected. These were the stipulations by which Flayn could enjoy her very first glass of champagne.

She dozed off into Mercedes’s lap before the glass was empty. Ingrid tipped the remainder back into her own mouth, sighing after she swallowed it.

The five of them sat, or lay, on the floor of Dorothea’s dressing room in a circle, as good as silent for how little they were saying when they spoke. The specter of death hung over their heads as sure as it did Dimitri’s.

Dorothea was drinking straight from the bottle, and no one could fault her.

When the bottle was polished off—with some help from Ingrid, at Dorothea’s cheeky insistence—Dorothea pulled rouge, powders, and perfumes from her vanity drawers. While Annette dove forward and rifled through the collection as Dorothea pulled things out, Ingrid snorted, rolled her eyes, and scooted back.

“Oh, Ingrid, _please_?” Dorothea cooed as soon as she noticed Ingrid retreating. “We never did get you into makeup for the ball back in school. And your face now is even _more_ beautiful, what I wouldn’t _give_ to do it up—”

“No, thanks,” Ingrid cut in with a bitter laugh and a raised hand. “Wasn’t my thing then, still isn’t my thing now. You guys have fun.” She unfolded her legs underneath her to stand, wobbling a bit as the wine resettled its weight in her body. “Want me to get you anything from the kitchens downstairs?”

Dorothea wore a miserable pout well, subtle in her lips but big in her eyes. She did not have to wear it well; it would have stopped Ingrid in her tracks either way. Mercedes’s pitiful stare and Annette’s disappointed puppy-dog eyes were the whipped cream and cherry on top.

“Please don’t leave,” Dorothea said softly.

Ingrid’s legs just about bent of their own volition to bring her back down to the floor.

“I promise to keep her under control around you,” Mercedes assured with a warm smile.

“Um, Mercedes, you’re kind of pinned down right now,” Ingrid said, pointing at Flayn.

“Oh!” She looked at her lap as if she had forgotten. “Well, I’ll use a very stern tone of voice if anyone tries anything you’re not comfortable with.”

Ingrid smirked. “Thanks, Mercedes.”

“But why _don’t_ you want to put on makeup, even if it’s only every once in a while?” Annette asked, as she held a glass jar of deep red powder near a candle to examine it. “You always say it’s because you don’t have time for things like that, but, well…”

Her gesture around the dark, quiet little dressing room was as limp as it was vague. The battle they had fought today was supposed to change the world, _had_ changed the world, and yet nothing about it was different enough for Annette to point to.

“The war’s over,” she said in a small voice, as if afraid that saying the words aloud would shatter this fragile, unfathomable, so-called peace. “Now we’ve got all the time in the world.”

They spent the next few seconds of all their time in the world sitting in dark silence.

Ingrid shrugged. “I don’t,” she began slowly, “like how it… feels, I guess. On my face.”

“Oh, but there’s lighter things, maybe?” Annette suggested, rolling forward onto her knees with all of her excitable energy. “Like, instead of creams, we can do powders—”

“Not _that_ powder, you’ll give her a heart attack.” Dorothea plucked the round jar from Annette’s hands. “This is my stage rouge, it’s _way_ too pigmented to wear in real life.”

This set Annette starry-eyed on a new course. “Dorothea, can you do my face in stage makeup? Just for fun?”

Dorothea raised her eyebrows, wearing a dubious half-smile. “You’ll look really silly,” she warned.

“I know, that’s the fun of it! If it’s too hard or the stuff is too expensive you don’t have to, I just—”

“Oh, no, no, come on,” Dorothea laughed, unfolding a small booklet of brushes, “we’re doing this.”

When Ingrid’s tense shoulders finally fell with an exhale, Mercedes giggled softly. “Just barely got out of that one, didn’t you?” she whispered to Ingrid.

“I thought you were going to keep them under control,” Ingrid muttered.

“Well, they’re under control now, aren’t they?” Mercedes smiled. Ingrid rolled her eyes, but she was smiling, too.

“For _now_ , maybe,” Annette threatened as a joke. She closed her eyes as Dorothea painted a near-white paste over her eyelids. “But really, if you don’t like how makeup _feels_ , you know there’s all sorts of different types you can try that will feel lighter, and they’re usually much more subtle, too, which is nice, so if you’re worried about—”

“Annie, sweetie, stop talking so I can put foundation on your chin,” Dorothea said.

Ingrid scratched at her wrists as if already imagining the itch of powder on her skin. “I don’t know if that would help,” she said warily.

“Mmm! Mm-hmm!” Annette hummed in assent, pressing her lips firmly together for Dorothea to cover with her brush. Dorothea took one look at Ingrid’s uncertain face, then set about painting even more slowly to lock Annette’s lips for longer.

“It sounds like maybe your problem isn’t just the way it physically feels,” said Mercedes carefully. “Do you think that’s true?”

Dorothea did not notice the shift in the air like the Blue Lion girls did. Even Annette’s words died at the tip of her tongue when Mercedes’ voice took on this tone, one Ingrid knew best from when she heard her use it on Sylvain. It was slow, gentle, deliberate, exacting, and absolutely devastating.

And here she was on the receiving end of it, about to be cut open and laid bare by words that would keep Flayn soothed to sleep as Mercedes absently stroked her hair and conducted an interrogation.

“Uh,” Ingrid stuttered out when she realized she had been silent for too long. “I mean… sure. There’s… a lot of things to it, I guess?”

“Right,” Mercedes agreed with a nod. “There’s the time it takes, there’s the way it feels. But if you could wake up every morning with a perfect face of makeup that felt like nothing at all on your skin, would you be happy?”

Ingrid wrinkled her nose. “Can I wash it off, ever?” she asked.

“Oh, sure! Let’s say that every day you get to choose whether you’ll have it or not,” Mercedes said. “Would you ever choose to wear it?”

The only sound that followed her was the clink of Dorothea putting the glass lid back onto her bottle of foundation. She was beginning to hear the hidden edge in Mercedes’s voice. Annette’s lips were free to move again, but they did not. Neither did Ingrid’s. She just shook her head.

“That’s what I thought might be the case,” Mercedes murmured. “Maybe it’s not about how the makeup _feels_ , but how it makes _you_ feel. What do you think?”

Ingrid shifted her legs underneath her, squishing her hands between her thighs to keep them from fidgeting. “Maybe,” she relented.

“Well, how _does_ it make you feel, if you don’t mind my asking?” Mercedes prompted gently. “It might help us understand you better if you tell us honestly, but you don’t have to say if you don’t want to.”

Ingrid looked around the dim room at the eyes on her—even Dorothea’s, as she slowly and repeatedly dipped a thin lip brush into a vial of deep red pigment—before finding more comfort in staring at her lap. Despite Mercedes’s assurances, she knew the only thing to do, the _right_ thing to do, was to find the words, not for the other girls, but for herself.

“It…” Her first word came out in a higher pitch of voice than she liked, so she exhaled, inhaled, and started again. “It’s like I’m wearing someone else’s face. It’s not me.”

“I think that’s fun,” Annette piped up, a stark sound in the relative silence. “Trying different looks, seeing how different colors and styles change your appearance…”

“Annie, sweetheart, it’s lip time,” Dorothea said. “Shh.”

Annette was silent for all of two seconds before she gave a startled “mmm!” as Dorothea began to paint strokes. When Dorothea pulled the brush away, Annette blurted, “That’s not where my lips are! What’re you doing?”

“Stage makeup, darling,” Dorothea sang. “We’ve got to give you lips they can see from the back of the concert hall. Oh, stop laughing, hold still!”

Annette sucked in her cheeks to bite them trying to keep her smile steady as Dorothea drew broad strokes to exaggerate the shape of her cupid’s bow. Ingrid struggled not to hate the caricature of femininity that Dorothea was creating—it was Annette’s face, not her own, and she thought it was fun.

“Does it make you feel dishonest, wearing a face that’s not your own?” Mercedes asked.

Ingrid chewed that one over, along with her bottom lip. “Sort of, maybe,” she said. “I mean, not because my face looks different. Anyone can see that I’m just wearing makeup. But it’s… I guess it’s because I’m wearing a face that’s got makeup on it, when I’m not really the kind of girl who wears makeup.”

“That’s sort of redundant, isn’t it?” Mercedes replied, her words just a little bit quicker now. “You don’t like wearing makeup because it will make people think you like wearing makeup. Surely there must be something else to it?”

There it was, the first surgically-precise slash of verbal evisceration. It had begun.

“Do you dislike the way you look with makeup on?” Mercedes suggested.

“I… I guess so,” Ingrid said. “I mean, objectively, I know it looks… beautiful, I guess. But it doesn’t look like _me_.”

“You probably haven’t had the chance to wear many different makeup looks,” Mercedes said. “Do you think there’s a look out there that you might like to try? Maybe a way you’d like your face to look, in general?”

Ingrid shook her head before Mercedes finished speaking, staring at the comically-large red lips Dorothea had finished painting on Annette’s face. “I don’t want my face to look feminine, and makeup makes it look feminine, no matter what ‘look’ you put on me,” she said, and it was the first thing she had said with confidence about this, so Mercedes’s surgical incision must have been a success. “I’m not a feminine lady. I know that, and I embrace it. I like it about myself.”

Dorothea gazed at her with something faraway and awed in her eyes. “Oh, Ingrid,” she breathed, “what if makeup could make you look masculine?”

In the split second it took for Ingrid to blink and comprehend those words, she lost all of the confidence she had accrued. “I,” she started uselessly, “what?”

“That’s an excellent question, Dorothea!” Beaming, Mercedes softly clapped her hands together. “Ingrid, do you know if you’d like that?”

“I… No,” she stammered. “I mean, no, I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“That’s alright,” Mercedes said sweetly. “Would you be willing to try? Just as a little experiment?”

“There are some opera roles for young boy characters, and they’re played by our alto girls or mezzos in makeup,” Dorothea said, leaving Annette with only one rouged cheek as she sorted through cakes of shadowy browns and tans among her equipment. “I’m not an expert, but I sort of know how it’s done, putting on contouring colors so your face looks more angular and masculine. I could do it for you—only if you like.”

From the drop and flip of her stomach, Ingrid looked down expecting to find the floor crumbling out from underneath her. “I… I dunno,” she said again.

“It’s alright, we can come back to that idea later,” Mercedes said, with a nod to Dorothea. “We have plenty of time before Dorothea finishes up Annette’s look. I think the more important question to ask first, Ingrid, is: when you say you aren’t feminine, do you mean that you’re masculine instead, or no? Do you feel like the antithesis of femininity, or just the lack of it?

Dorothea was not finishing up Annette’s look. The two of them were staring at Ingrid, awaiting her response.

“I still don’t know,” Ingrid said. Her voice was starting to get shaky.

Mercedes filled the space with a deep, slow inhale and exhale that compelled Ingrid to breathe with her, and then a warm smile. “That’s alright,” she said. “I think it’s a very big step for you to say you don’t want to embrace femininity, and I’m proud of you for sharing that with us. It’s certainly alright if you don’t have every little thing figured out just yet.”

The surgery was finished, and Ingrid felt like she was coming out from under anesthesia as a sudden clarity flooded her mind.

“You,” she realized, “you think I’m transgender.”

“Oh, no, of course not,” Mercedes said, gently affronted. “I can’t think that sort of thing for you. I can point it out as a possibility, though, if you’re having these feelings about gender. What do you think?”

In only a few seconds of silence, Ingrid had said everything she could.

“Oh, Ingrid,” Dorothea murmured, like love spilled from her lips with each syllable. But love sounded an awful lot like pity when feeling as small as Ingrid felt then.

“Don’t worry, you’re not supposed to have an answer for that yet.” Mercedes reached out an arm to pat Ingrid on the shoulder without shifting her legs under Flayn’s head. “It took me a long while, too.”

Ingrid nodded dumbly, still feeling rather slow to be coming to grips with this only now. Mercedes had herself all figured out well before the age of twenty-three, after all.

“And we can help!” Annette chimed in.

Ingrid took one look at her and let out a snorting laugh so hard it expelled something from her nose.

“What?” Annette turned to Dorothea, furrowing her thickened, arched brows and pouting with her giant red lips. It was not unusual to see her cheeks as rosy as the rouge painted him, but the emphasized shadows underneath them to illuse high cheekbones was highly unusual on her round face. The worst was the falsies glued, as of yet, only to one eye, darkening and thickening her ordinarily very pale lashes. “What does it look like?!”

“Sit down, I’m not done! Let me get your other eye,” Dorothea laughed, pushing Annette down by the shoulders with the heels of her palms as she pinched the other set of false lashes between her thumb and middle finger. “You look silly because you’re supposed to look silly. I told you that.”

“I wanted _stage_ makeup, not clown makeup!” Annette protested. Folding her arms, she held one eye shut for Dorothea to apply the lashes to. “Did you make me a clown?!”

“She didn’t, Annie,” Mercedes giggled. “You did that all by yourself.”

“Wow!” Annette yelled. “ _Wow_. I can’t believe my future girlfriend would say something like that to me.”

“Oh, does this mean you _are_ planning on accepting my courtship?” Mercedes said.

Annette dropped her mouth open and scoffed. Her natural blush glowed through the layers of foundation and powder brighter than the rouge. When the pink had crept all the way down her neck, and even Dorothea and Ingrid had started laughing, she clamped her mouth shut and pursed her lips. “I _am_ a clown,” she whimpered. “I’m a clown.”

“Sweetie, you look gorgeous,” Dorothea said with a little pat on her back. “Go look in my mirror.”

She clamored up to the vanity with childlike excitement, only to let out a bewildered noise when she beheld herself in all her over-exaggerated glory. “Dorothea!” she cried. “Do you really wear this onstage? It looks so—”

“No, back up,” Dorothea said, beckoning her away from the mirror with a wave. “Look at yourself from across the room.”

Annette watched her feet as she walked herself backward across the room from the vanity until she was flush against the opposite wall, and looked up again. Her eyebrows flicked up, and her eyes went wide. She tilted her head to examine the shape and color of it from all sides. “Oh,” she said, quiet and awed.

“Exactly,” Dorothea said with a smug smile.

Indeed, from a distance, Annette turned from an overwhelming caricature to a drop-dead gorgeous diva. Ingrid stole a look at Mercedes to see the fondness in her eyes as she beheld the one she loved, painted in a new way.

“If you do… the masculine stage makeup, for me,” Ingrid began tentatively, “can you, um… not do it so… _much_? Like that? Just a little bit.”

Dorothea drew in a silent gasp that Ingrid could see from the rise of her bosom. The weight of her eyes was almost too intense to meet, but her beauty made it too hard to look away. “You know, Ingrid,” she said softly, “I think I’d do anything for you.”

Ingrid felt her face grow even hotter. “You—what?”

“Oh, don’t mind me. This moment is about you, dear,” Dorothea said, gathering up the neutral-colored items among her collection. “Come sit in my chair. I’ll do it in front of the mirror for you, so you can see it while I’m putting it on.”

Mercedes said that Ingrid had taken a big step already today towards finding herself and her identity. With legs that felt like jelly underneath her, she took the next ones, little as they were, to Dorothea’s chair.

“I love everything that you are, my Ingrid,” Dorothea whispered in Ingrid’s ear as she sat down. “And I’ll love everything you become. I love _you_.”

It must have been ages since Ingrid last looked in a mirror, _really_ looked. Her hair was longer, and she did not remember such deep bags under her eyes, but overall, she felt a sort of peace she had never known when looking at herself. This was no longer a self she was going to glance away from when it appeared in the reflections of windows or lakes, one that she neglected for the sake of other things. After the war, she was going to take the time to love this self, either as it was, or by changing it to become what she wanted it to be.


End file.
